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Tag Archives: Wax Wrappers

In honor of the impending spooktacular festivities coming in just one short week I thought it would be fun to make today’s Wax Paper Pop Art a super-sized, all-horror edition. First up we have the complete set of wrappers from the 1988 Topps Fright Flicks card set (you can see the Stickers here)…

Straying a bit into some more classical monster territory we have the wrappers for the 1980 Topps Creature Feature sequel set (the stickers for which I talked about here), as well as the wrapper for the original 1973 set…

You can’t talk about 80s horror without mentioning the Gremlins. Well, at least I can’t. This is the wrapper from the 1984 Topps trading card set, the stickers are mentioned here…

For this last wrapper we’ll need to hop in the DeLorean and travel back all the way to 1964, ending up on 1313 Mockingbird Lane for a visit with the Leaf Munsters trading cards…

To sort of keep this week’s McDonalds posts going I thought I’d take a minute to share some awesome trading cards from the impressive collection of the one and only Brandon of the Waffle Whiffer Zone. Brandon’s site and Flickr feed have been a constant source of inspiration on Branded for the last four years and change.

Since I haven’t been able to find a physical example of any McDonald’s branded wax packages, I figured the next best thing would be to take a look at some trading cards the company produced in Cleveland, Ohio back in 1974. These promo cards are all themed with specific iconography of the area including the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (behind Grimace), Hale Farm & Western Reserve Village in Bath, Ohio in Summit County (behind Mayor McCheese), the Cleveland Health Museum and Education Center (behind Officer Big Mac), the Great Lakes Historical Society Museum in Vermilion (behind Captain Crook), the Cleveland Zoo in Brookside Park (behind Ronald McDonald), and the Blossom Music Center, located between Cleveland and Akron (behind a very laid back Hamburglar.)

One of the things that I love about these cards is that the art is so simplified and interesting. It’s the same aesthetic that draws me to bubblegum card wax package art. It’s much better than the art in that 1980 Calendar I shared on Monday too.

Heartfelt thanks go out to Brandon for letting me use the images from his Flickr feed. You should definitely take a moment and visit him at his site, Waffle Whiffer Zone for some amazing nostalgic ephemera…

Today on Wax Paper Pop Art, Indiana Jones. The first wrapper is a little boring, if only because Topps/O-Pee-Chee used a glorified photocop in the artwork instead of loosely re-drawing the image. I’m much more interested in the crude, simplistic renderings with these wrappers, or at least re-drawn images. Photo quality is just sort of lifeless…

Raiders of the Lost Ark from Topps (O-Pee-Chee in Canada), 1981.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from Topps, 1984. I talked about the stickers here.

I’ve been falling in love with the USA network show Burn notice recently, and it’s got me thinking about all the tropes that make for a great one-and-done hour-long action shows. And this got me thinking about Tom Selleck and his sweet ride. So here you go…

Can you hear the theme music? I can. And now I’m going to try and stop an out-of-control Winnebago that has an illegal poker game inside. Or do I tackle that out-of-control go-cart with the wind-surfing sail attached? Damnit, there’s also some unruly skateboarders tearing up the local sidewalks! Of course Elvira is also in town, so there’s that too. A CHiPie’s job is never done…

I wonder why the person in charge of picking the colors for this 1982 Donruss Knight Rider wax pack didn’t think to switch out the red and blue of Michael’s shirt and jacket to get it a bit more accurate to the show? Anyway, I wish these cards had a sticker card subset, but alas, they didn’t…